Jim Lillig is Digital Marketing Director at NSI Industries, a Buffalo Grove, Illinois, PE-backed company that sells electrical connectors and other products in the building technologies sector.
Jim is an experienced B2B marketer who’s a font of useful information about what works — and what doesn’t — in the age of influencers, retail media networks, and a new generation of prospects conditioned by Amazon to expect a seamless B2B purchasing experience. He’s also a man who doesn’t mince words when it comes to critiquing what Google is lately up to in terms of removing cookies and IP address-based information from marketers’ toolkits.
I really enjoyed my conversation with Jim. We cover many topics relevant to anyone doing B2B marketing today, including:
- The particular challenges of B2B marketing in the building technologies sector, including complexity and channel conflicts.
- The challenges of managing data for B2B manufacturers, especially with respect to obtaining clean data for distributors.
- Effective B2B marketing strategies, including targeting specific audiences through geofencing and traps, custom audiences, and first-party data.
- The importance of ontology, hierarchy, and taxonomy in B2B purchasing.
- How a potential acquisition of Hubspot by Google will impact the digital marketing ecosystem.
- The importance of understanding social media beyond just personal use, especially in B2B.
- How marketers should leverage forums, testimonials and social media to influence the purchase decision at the point of sale.
- The importance of omni-channel marketing, given the fragmentation of media and the need for brands to be present across multiple channels to reach their target audience.
- The potential impact of Google’s privacy-driven changes on ABM (Account Based Marketing) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) marketing.
- Challenges associated with aggregating accurate sentiment data from customer comments.
- Why smart marketers should focus on collecting first party data from all marketing activities.
